Blackmail saga shows web contempt for injunctions NEWSPAPERS: LAW

Sunday Herald, The, Nov 4, 2007 by Steven Vass Media Correspondent

THERE is nothing like cocaine, sex and blackmail to get newspaper editors' juices flowing, so it was hardly surprising that the front pages were full of the royal blackmail sting last week.

Readers only had to get a couple of lines in, however, before they were informed that they would not learn the name of the victim because the press had been ordered by court injunction not to print it.

In these days of whizz-bang technology, there was just one problem. Any reader punch drunk on the details of alleged gay sex acts and lines of cocaine chopped by Harrods charge cards had only to take a quick look online to find out who was allegedly involved.

On Google News, alongside the laconic British stories, were international newspapers only too happy to run with the royal's name. Ditto numerous blogs and chat rooms easily found through the main Google search engine.

It seems a long way from the days of Spycatcher, when it took some effort for Brits to read Peter Wright's Australiapublished 1980s account of life in the British secret service.

And with each new internet expose from the face of News of the World undercover journalist Mazher Mahmoud to the former Premiership manager who took out an injunction to prevent details of his infidelities leaking out the problem gets worse as increasing numbers of readers get their news online. To some observers, there now seems little point in bothering with court interdicts and injunctions at all.

To recap on the royal story, two men were arrested by police for allegedly trying to blackmail a minor member of the royal family over an incriminating videotape. The tape is said to show an aide chopping up cocaine and discussing a sex act that had already taken place with the royal before the latter asked for another line of the drug.

The story goes that the men demanded GBP50,000 in exchange for their silence, only to be filmed and subsequently arrested meeting a detective posing as another royal aide after the victim went to the police.

A judge ordered in a private hearing in September that no details of the victim should appear in the papers, which would hold any British title running the story in contempt of court.

These were the details that appeared in the Sunday Times, Sunday Mail and Mail on Sunday last weekend and were followed up by numerous dailies during the week.

Given that the member of the royal family involved is barely a household name, one side issue is that the story actually gained prominence as a result of the injunction. Editors were suggesting privately last week that it would arguably not have been front-page material if they had been able to reveal the name of the person involved.

But if the mystique possibly added to the appeal for some editors, it is not clear that it benefited sales. Trade estimates did not show any blanket rise for the papers that ran with the story.

Whether or not court orders add spice to front pages, this latest case will provide little comfort to people whose anonymity is being compromised elsewhere.

With UK-based internet chat rooms and blogs, judges have generally not pursued contempt actions. The case law basically says that internet service providers and chat rooms will not be liable for content so long as they do not monitor postings but take action whenever anything untoward is reported to them. Individual writers, meanwhile, have not been targeted.

As Campbell Deane, a media lawyer at Edinburgh firm Bannatyne Kirkwood France & Co, says: "The purpose of injunctions and interdicts is really to stop the newspapers and the media from broadcasting something. It's not to stop individual people chatting about it." He says that normally bloggers would be protected by the freedom of expression rules under the Human Rights Act, and that only those with inside information who were the obvious original source might be at risk.

Even then, it would be very difficult to establish their guilt in practice.

On the international front, the situation looks even more vexed. There have been cases, such as over the adult identities of the Jamie Bulger killers, where courts have sought to impose worldwide injunctions, but Deane says that it is almost impossible to police in practice.

"It's not going to succeed and they know it, " he says.

One person who strongly disagrees with this point of view is Giovanni di Stefano, the advocate who is acting for one of the alleged blackmailers.

He wrote to attorney general Baroness Scotland last week calling on her to launch prosecutions against all overseas newspapers that named the royal, arguing that a combined interpretation of recent case law and the Contempt of Court Act gave them a case to answer.

"It's about time that Britain showed its teeth. You try violating a German or a French contempt of court and see how quickly they issue warrants. Why shouldn't Britain?" The attorney general's office declined to comment on whether it would pursue either any international newspapers or British websites over outing the royal, but certainly in the case of the international press, one can imagine the arguments to the contrary.